The Trump team is creating divisions in society

By now it’s clear that President Donald Trump needs to be taken both seriously and literally. Trump’s decisions give cause for concern, but also the decision-making process itself. The President has surrounded himself with a small group of confidantes. Loyalty has been the main criterion. Not a wealth of experience or insights.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, is the most eye-catching member of that exclusive inner circle. He made his name as the boss of Breitbart News which is associated with the alt-right movement. Bannon is warning against the demise of Jewish-Christian culture as a result of liberal fallacies, corrupt elites, and Islamic terrorists.

{mosads}He said in 2013,”I am a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state and that is my goal too. I want to bring everything to collapse and destroy everything established today.”

The question is will Bannon be to Trump what Karl Rove was to George W. Bush? Rove regarded himself as someone who could not just reap the profits of the political landscape and relations but also permanently change that landscape. His approach often proved disastrous. Trump and Bannon are operating in a similar manner:

1. Selecting the most ambitious/outrageous option on the list and go for it in a very aggressive way.

2. Ignoring the importance of maintaining ties with the Republican members of Congress whereas, in the end, close collaboration with Congress is the only way to move forward.

3. Seeing themselves as far more important than the leaders in Congress and going out of their way to demonstrate this in a most irritating and arrogant manner.

4. Ignoring or not understanding the process of policy implementation. The Atlantic’s Joshua Green wrote this about Rove, “He was often ineffective at bringing into being anything that required more than a presidential signature.”

5. Terrorism and war are mainly seen as ‘tools’ with the aim of sowing dissension not unity.

6. It does not grasp the notion that controversial reforms usually cannot be realised along partisan lines as members of Congress know full well that their own party could suffer electoral losses whereas they cannot share this ‘pain’ with the opposition party.

Green drew three lessons from his analysis of ‘The Rove Presidency’. First, don’t concentrate too much power in a small group of people. Second, prevent too much overlap between policy and politics. Finally, pinching off information channels into the White House is extremely dangerous.

Trump disregards these lessons. The Trump team is creating divisions in society, treating Congress with contempt, blurring boundaries between politics and policy, conjuring one order after another from a hat without considering the implementation or implications, and appear to shut themselves off from outside influences. 

It remains to be seen if Trump will really manage to change US politics and policy areas for good. Two conditions will need to be met if he is to leave his mark. One, party loyalty needs to have weakened in order to create room for major transformations. That is to say, the electorate will have to be willing to embrace change. Plus, society has to undergo trauma as a catalyst for change.

Democrats and Republicans are dinosaurs in the eyes of voters; the reason so many people voted Trump was that they were disgusted with traditional politics. The Tea Party split the Republicans to some extent but Trump takes the biscuit. He did not bother to present himself as a Republican but claimed he was above politics. He savaged all of Washington; not just the Democrats. At the same time, the rise of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren indicates that Democrats, too, are at a crossroads.

To quote Time journalist David von Drehle, Trumpism is “spawned by the culture wars, stoked by the Great Recession and spread by the winds of technological disruption.” 9/11 amounted to a national trauma. Not least due to a number of failed wars. Add to this the 2008 crisis, which was a shock to western capitalism and globalisation. State-capitalist authoritarian countries such as China and Russia will do everything they can to fan the crisis. In short, the electorate is sufficiently malleable to facilitate fundamental changes.

Bannon will grab whatever opportunity comes his way as chief strategist. His opponents often conclude that he is malicious. Yet, as Bannon was educated at Georgetown and Harvard he cannot simply be dismissed as stupid. At the same time, there is no certainty that he or Trump have the capabilities to break the back of the establishment.

For now, Bannon gets his way in battling his ghosts of secularization, islamisation and derailed capitalism. Let us hope that the famous U.S. checks and balances will prevent havoc.

Andy Langenkamp is Senior Political Analyst at ECR Research and political commentator, who specialises in assessing the repercussions for the financial markets of economic and geopolitical events.

The views of contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.